How Important is it for a freelancer to develop portfolio
A Portfolio is a collection of things, such as investments, photographs, drawings or articles. A freelancer, no matter in what professional fields, should have a portfolio to showcase the projects done and keep update it through time.
Where to put your portfolio?
There are so many ways to keep track of your portfolio and they are all free.
- Google Drive or Google Doc. Open a folder with public access, and drag in all the portfolio files. You can use a word file for each job you’ve done, describe the company, the time it takes, the scope of work and achievement, and the budget. And of course add your contact details.
- Drop box. It works like Google drive, and it’s very good for graphic designers to showcase graphics and videos.
- Your own website or blog. Use blogger, google site, medium, Quora blog (like this one), free wordpress blog or any other blogging service you like as a place to demonstrate your works. This is essential for freelancers related to writing, you must first show your writings.
Such portfolio can save you lots of time and energy, whenever you approach a customer you just have to drop the link and invite them to see what you have done.
Let’s say you don’t have customer yet, you are either a new starter or just left a company and start on your own, and you can’t showcase what you did before. So what to do in this case?
Very simple - you create for yourself first.
How do you create your own portfolio? This is a secret information but you're free to take it.
Do a freelance job for an imaginary company or an existing company that you like. For example, if you like Dubai Burj Al Arab Jumeirah Hotel, the famous 7-star hotel, imagine that they come to you and ask for your illustration design/ marketing campagin/ translation services. Then you do a job for them. Post this job on your website or blog as your portfolio. This is how you create your own portfolio, and you can create as many as you like.
A Chinese Translation Company does that and earns many big deals due to this "self-created portfolio" method. So now they have many portfolio from paid customers, besides those free, self-created ones.
